Victorian Costuming

Cha Cha dance marathon

Two steps forward, two steps back. I’m still working on my undersleeves. Third time is the charm.

I unraveled my first attempt because it was going to be too small, like arm corsets. In my second attempt, I decided to have it be two colors like the pattern suggests, I increased the number of stitches to make it bigger and I decided to use my new wooden knitting needles and not the circular needles (no reason for that other than simply wanting to see how they feel). The instructions called for plain knitting which I interpreted as the stocking stitch (knit one row, purl one row, repeat). One side is flat/untextured which is, in my mind, plain. When I switched the colors, I began to see that the striping effect would be on the wrong side of the work, thus defeating the purpose of having stripes. That is when I remembered that in Victorian knitting terminology, plain knit means knit all rows. If I knit all rows, the wrong side would be the side with no stripes and the correct side would be the one with stripes. Duh. Unravel again.

Attempt three. And hopefully, the last one. Scrap all my previous instructions for this project. Correct instructions to follow once I finally get these things done!

The one perk to this way of doing things, is the ribbing effect will serve to hold the puffs out in a round shape. When I did them in stocking stitch, the puffs were flat like a hem and I began to think I’d have to stuff them to get them to hold out their shape.